ought of moving again. Where were the thunders of Jehovah?
No sacred word of all her long prayers came to her tongue--not even
"Hear, O Israel." She felt that she was in direct communication with
God--awful thought!--and He would read her mind and would send His
answer.

[Illustration: SABBATH LOAVES FOR SALE (BREAD MARKET, POLOTZK)]

An age passed in blank expectancy. Nothing happened! Where was the
wrath of God? _Where was God?_

When she turned to go home, the little philosopher had her
handkerchief tied around her wrist in the proper way. The experiment
was over, though the result was not clear. God had not punished her,
but nothing was proved by His indifference. Either the act was no sin,
and her preceptors were all deceivers; or it was indeed a sin in the
eyes of God, but He refrained from stern justice for high reasons of
His own. It was not a searching experiment she had made. She was
bitterly disappointed, and perhaps that was meant as her punishment:
God refused to give her a reply. She intended no sin for the sake of
sin; so, being still in doubt, she tied her handkerchief around her
wrist. Her eyes stared more than ever,--this was the child with the
staring eyes,--but that was the only sign she gave of a consciousness
suddenly expanded, of a self-consciousness intensified.

When she went back into the house, she gazed with a new curiosity at
her mother, at her grandmother, dozing in their chairs. They looked
_different_. When they awoke and stretched themselves and adjusted wig
and cap, they looked _very_ strange. As she went to get her
grandmother her Bible, and dropped it accidentally, she kissed it by
way of atonement just as a proper child should.

How, I wonder, would this Psalm-singing child have be enlabelled by
the investigator of her mind? Would he have called her a Jew? She was
too young to be called an apostate. Perhaps she would have been
dismissed as a little fraud; and I should be content with that
classification, if slightly modified. I should say the child was a
piteously puzzled little fraud.

To return to the honest first person, I _was_ something of a fraud.
The days when I believed everything I was told did not run much beyond
my teething time. I soon began to question if fire was really hot, if
the cat would really scratch. Presently, as we have seen, I questioned
God. And in those days my religion depended on my mood. I could
believe anything I wanted to believe. I did believ